No I think you’ll find cross dressing is an actual thing. Transvestites are very specific about it.
The transvestite comedian Andrew O’Neill describes it in a very quick way as wanting to emulate and look like what you find attractive.
It’s the desire to appear feminine or masculine I’d of course going to be bound up to clothing. Because there are fundamentally different bodyshapes, and ways to make those body’s apes look different and that will always provide a distinction in clothing.
We might get to a point where commonly there are mens dresses, but like women’s trousers now they will be cut differently and there is just going to be a division of masculine and feminine clothing.
Andrew O’Neill (whose stand up generally is great and his history of metal show in particular is amazing even for non comedy fans, if they like metal even a little) actually makes this point sort of in his stand up where he describes how he was a rubbish crossdresser and looked awful till someone pointed out that he was a man and couldn’t just wear a bog standard off the shelf woman’s dress and look good. So he cross dresses now he has to get clothing that works for his frame.
I also happen to think a dress/trousers is a better symbol than a pair of tits/a dick.
But if we acknowledge that such norms are specific to certain times and places, then it might be more accurate to say that, rather than “a thing”, that they are “many things”. The danger is in making them out to be total, absolute - and even open-minded, sympathetic people do this. Whenever we make such references as:
…we are stripping out the all-important cultural context. And these norms do not exist without it. Perhaps pink really is a masculine color in the time and place where @caryroys is, but I very much doubt that this can be assumed universally.
One factor to be considered is that masculinity and femininity are stereotypes. But the argument I hear against this tends to be ineffective, basically that “these are not stereotypes because they really affect people.” But this is precisely why in other areas, such as race and ethnicity, people work for progress against stereotyping. It is a process, a lazy way of categorizing people which depersonalizes people and is prone to the distortions of bias. Just because it is expected does not make it any more accurate or fair than talk of dressing like a professor, or like a black person.
What makes these norms contradictory is that in contemporary western society at least, governments and organizations alike claim to be “multicultural” environments. This should automatically make promotion of or adherence to a specific set of norms to be rather suspect. Of course, in practice, they are hardly multicultural at all. It is a PR form which I call “false multiculturalism”, but since they profess to it, this makes adapting do norms from other cultures their problem, rather than that of the individual. Along with the issue of sex and gender alike usually being categories protected from discrimination. Why is wearing something from “box F” a problem if “F” is itself accepted as normal?
Telling people how to thus present themselves is too prescriptive and authoritarian to reconcile with the claimed realities of contemporary society. Naturally, this doesn’t mean that some won’t still do it. Why I think women have an easier time of it is that there is little sexist cultural stigma of appearing to be male. Whereas if/when people are treated unfairly for appearing female, this more than anything indicates trends of sexist values. And a powerful way to fight sexism is to attack the stereotypes, just as is being done for race. Whatever you think you know about stereotype X is exactly that - what you only thought you knew. Sex-specific dress codes are themselves sexist, and as people fight these, the notions that specific groups of people can be easily identified with certain clothing will diminish.
There is a contradiction here. Conformity would ideally involve its norms being in some way definitive. If they aren’t, then the amount of pressure hardly even matters. Identity itself is a problematic red-herring, while assignment is an imposition which is difficult to justify.
I don’t think it’s really that clear that this is true, it being easier for F > M individuals. (Citation needed?)
Even if that were the case, I would speculate a whole host of reasons why off the top of my head:
-Living one’s life female before taking male hormones produces a more passable look than vice versa.
-More socially acceptable for women to dress in men’s clothing to begin with, as opposed to vice-versa
-Gay women seem to provoke less revulsion from anti-gay people (to the haters in society, this is not a false equivalence)
To be fair, I think your main point is a big chunk of it. It provokes revulsion among those people who feel maleness is equivalent to power, and giving up that birthright is unconscionable. This raises the question on why it’s somehow more OK to allow “pretenders to the throne”? (I’m not convinced it is, among the same demographic)
As an after thought, is perhaps the revulsion from the anti-trans movement in large part due to a failure on complete passability? The top of my list relates to a mixture of obviously male features mixed with female presentation. It’s probably easier to gain bone and muscle mass (and thus features) than to lose it, when tinkering with hormone balances. And when not considering hormones, appearing as a boyish adult (or at least androgynous) male than someone who is obviously identifiable as a male, presenting as female.
On this last count, I recently saw one such a person walking back from lunch with a bunch of office mates. With heels, probably at least 6’5", mid fifties, chiseled jaw and features, seemingly in charge chatting casually with everyone. Not west coast or NYC, or even in Chicago proper, but one of the suburbs. It’s a truly a new millenium, everyone.
Yeah, I think ultimately the message of FFVII is self-acceptance. I think that’s part of why Cloud is an anti-hero in the beginning: he’s putting on a tough-guy act because he can’t accept his own failings, can’t even conceive of them at the game’s opening. This reaches its climax in Aerith’s death, and his subsequent breakdown - just as remembering Tifa is weakening his grip on his new identity (Narratively speaking, Aerith’s death is kind of a “stuffed in the refrigerator” moment, but Tifa is the reason he keeps remembering who he REALLY is).
